symmetric positive-definite matrices

Expressivity Limits of Congruence-Based Architectures for Neural Networks on Positive-Definite Matrices

This paper analyzes neural network architectures designed to classify symmetric positive-definite (SPD) matrices, focusing on congruence-like layers as used in SPDNet. The authors prove that imposing semi-orthogonality constraints on weight matrices limits expressivity, causing deep architectures to collapse to single-hidden-layer equivalents due to spectral diversity loss—a consequence of Poincaré's separation theorem. The work also compares Riemannian classifiers for compatibility with congruence-based feature maps.